Tension Swelling At Secret Sessions

THURMONT, Md. — The Clinton administration struggled on Friday to hold the Mideast summit together amid growing tension among the negotiators and Palestinian complaints that proposed U.S. compromises mirrored Israel's negotiating positions.

Maintaining the administration's strict news lid on the peace talks, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart on Friday would neither confirm nor deny a flurry of reports coming from diplomatic sources who insisted on anonymity.

But Lockhart conceded that the atmosphere at the Catoctin Mountain retreat has grown more tense as the negotiators grappled with core issues in the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people.

"I've heard about a lot of tensions between the parties," Lockhart said. "As they work through these issues, this process is bound to get harder."

Lockhart dismissed reports that the Palestinian delegation, led by Yasser Arafat, had threatened to leave the summit when a proposal by the United States appeared to favor Israel.

"I didn't see any luggage today," Lockhart said.

Lockhart said the issues being negotiated by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak are "intractable," a word that did not produce optimism among Israeli and Palestinian officials closely following the secret negotiations.

The negotiators are grappling over whether Israel will grant the Palestinians control over any part of Jerusalem; the borders of a future Palestinian state; and the fate of more than 3 million Palestinian refugees and of some 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright left Camp David to meet with Hanan Ashrawi and other members of a small delegation of Palestinian opposition leaders in nearby Emmitsburg, Md.

The delegation had asked to meet with Arafat, but U.S. officials apparently persuaded the Palestinian leader to remain secluded at Camp David.

The U.S. strategy is to isolate Barak and Arafat from their own constituencies' opposition groups to increase the chances of reaching a deal.

The other half of the U.S. strategy is keeping information about the talks under wraps at Camp David to prevent an eruption of criticism by these same opposition groups from upsetting the talks.

Albright told the Palestinians that the atmosphere in the talks was becoming increasingly difficult. She urged them to support the peace process and repeated her admonition that neither side will get 100 percent of what it wants.

Ashrawi said: "We weren't there as negotiators. We were there to represent the Palestinian political spectrum."

The U.S. efforts to contain the flow of information at the peace talks were not limited to pressuring the Palestinian side.

At the elementary school being used as a press filing center, a State Department official ushered a member of the Israeli opposition Likud Party off the grounds.

The State Department had similarly halted an impromptu news conference being held two days earlier by a Palestinian.

"Symmetry has been achieved," a State Department official said after the same policy was invoked against Livnat.